The Big Excuse

“I’m not creative.” It’s the world’s grandest excuse for not coming up with ideas. We’re all born creative and then self-consciousness and peer pressure suck it out of us along the way. Claiming you’re not creative lets you step aside and avoid the hard work that’s required. Creative ideas don’t generally pop up out of nowhere. It’s not easy:

Think hard. It takes all your knowledge, experience, and perspective, percolating away in your mind, to be creative. You need to spend time thinking about your subject in different ways, using exercises to generate new connections and parallels, and coming up with lots of ideas. It’s not quick and it’s not easy.

Generate lots of ideas. Some will pan out, some won’t. Others will evolve. Chances are that whatever your “good idea” is, it’ll need some work. Just consider today’s popular Dyson vacuum. John Dyson, creator of the bagless vacuum cleaner, certainly had a great idea. He had to make prototypes before he got it right — many of them. In fact, he made 5,127 of them.

Prepare to go it alone. Ask anyone who’s had a great, truly unusual idea that was successful. Somewhere along the way he or she walked a very lonely road, with most people thinking he was nuts. This is what really makes people nervous about being creative. We’re raised to gravitate toward conformity and going out on a limb proposing something unique is a risk.

There’s no right or wrong. No one can tell you your idea is right or wrong. It might be successful in today’s market, but 5 years ago might not have flown. It might be right with some tweaking, or it might fail. It might work for Company B but not Company A. You need to generate ideas, refine them, create variations, and then test and try.